Remember This Before Diving into Ecommerce
For the entertainment professionals out there, here is a quick guide with tips to ensure your ecommerce journey goes smoothly.
Events, TV shows, album releases are big events with short-lived marketing campaigns. However, most ecommerce cart platforms, fulfillment systems, and operations workflows are designed to operate for a long period of time and run to a certain level of reliability so that orders get charged and shipped appropriately. They can and should live on after your event has taken place or your TV show has been released.
Ecommerce is much more rigid in what you can design and build quickly because products and orders have strict data requirements for inventory management and fulfillment.
If you’re building websites for artists or other creative influencers, try to set expectations. Artists may be expecting a blank creative canvas, but a web store is not a blank canvas, it’s a paint-by-numbers.
Ecommerce has rules for UX/UI that you must follow in platforms like Shopify and Magento. No matter what way you shake it, your product catalog, cart and checkout experience must use the common patterns that everyone else uses. You need to ensure that the talent you work with understands this concept.
If possible, bring in an expert to help guide and manage your ecommerce business. If you work for a large organization that has an existing ecommerce department, try to share knowledge and resources with another team’s ecommerce department rather than go in blind.
